


Summer 1975

by marilynhanson



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 14:43:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2195712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marilynhanson/pseuds/marilynhanson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Remus learned through the years that loving Sirius Black means damning himself to a boy who is equal parts selfish and glorious."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer 1975

Remus kneels in an empty church, tasting old wood and dust and half-forgotten prayers. His knees, prematurely arthritic, protest at his position on the oak floor, but he remains still. The church’s bones too must ache; its ancient framework threatens to give in the growing storm. It will not. Remus knows this as he knows that he himself will not give under the strain of the coming moon. They – boy and building, son and sanctuary – will dig themselves into the earth and stay rooted there long enough to finish a prayer.

He not here because he kissed a boy. 

Remus has kissed boys before – kissed Sirius before – and spent nights counting cracks in his bedroom ceiling, searching for guilt within his labyrinthine sixteen-year-old heart. He has never felt guilty for it before. For comparison’s sake, he has also kissed Emmeline Vance, and found the experiences equally terrifying, equally pleasurable. In neither did he find cause for kneeling in a chapel in the dark. 

He does not believe in the kind of sin you can commit by kissing someone. Remus thinks sin rushes in and out of his heart sixty times per minute, pumping with his blood through valves and veins. There is sin in his venom; he sins with the tug of the moon. He knows it intimately. He has never tasted sin on Sirius’s lips.

He is here because the boy he kissed was not Sirius.

Anger pricks persistently through the numbness, and again he tamps it down like gunpowder, with excruciating caution, lest it ignite. Remus has every right to kiss someone who isn’t Sirius. Remus should never want to kiss Sirius again. He has not kissed Sirius since fall of last year when he awoke in a scratchy hospital wing bed to grey eyes full of fear and anger and loathing. Remus knows that he has every right to spend the rest of his life kissing hundreds of people who are not Sirius Black, and still, Remus wants to kiss him again. 

Remus learned through the years that loving Sirius Black means damning himself to a boy who is equal parts selfish and glorious. Storms brew beneath his skin, stretching him taut until something snaps and the pent-up cruelty shatters the weak dams he builds for Remus’s sake. He forges promises from spun glass, treasures them for a while, runs calloused fingertips over them with reverence until some small scurrying noise distracts him and they tumble from his hands to disintegrate at his feet. He kicks the shards aside for someone else to sweep into the bin. 

Remus is not sure if he believes in God, but he was brought here to be washed clean as a child with blood seeping through linen bandages, and so here he returns, infected by shame, or fury, or loathing. The fury is for himself. He has not slept in three days. Everything he has tried to eat tastes acidic, burnt. The fury is for wanting Sirius more than he wants autonomy.

He cannot forgive himself for loving somebody this much, so he kneels and clasps his hands and tastes the salt of sweat mingled with dust on his tongue as he tries to find forgiveness in something bigger than himself. 

The eternal problem is this: through prayer or ritual or desperation, he cannot find anything as beautiful as Sirius Black.


End file.
